The employment of what are referred to as Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) for automating production and/or manufacturing sequences is known from “Software für die Automatisierung—Transparenz über die Abläufe schaffen”, an article by Dirk Kozian in Elektronik für die Automatisierung 11, Nov. 17, 1999. These systems integrate the automation level (controls) with the ERP systems (ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning) of the enterprise control level. Manufacturing Execution Systems are systems which provide information for optimizing production sequences, for example. In the first place, Manufacturing Execution Systems have to supplement the rough planning data of the ERP systems with plant-specific and up-to-date fine planning data and forward it correspondingly to the lower-placed automation layer; in the second place, they have the task of taking production-related information from the automation level, processing it and reporting it to the enterprise control level. MES systems therefore perform the task of vertical integration between the enterprise control level and the automation level. Typical individual tasks of MES systems comprise Enterprise Asset Management, Maintenance Management, Information Management, Scheduling, Dispatching and Trace & Track. These tasks are carried out by MES components or MES applications in each case.
Due to the software-related and data-related heterogeneity of the MES applications, however, they can only be integrated into a common system or project with very great difficulty and the exchange of data between these applications is only possible with some effort.
The integration of software components into a software system by means of what are referred to as adapters or by means of wrapping (packaging) is known from “Massive Wiederverwendung: Konzepte, Techniken und Organisation”, an article by Ulrich Lindner in OBJEKTspektrum January 1996, pages 10-17. The aim in this respect is to increase the reusability of software components.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,557,798 describes a communication interface between software applications over which the applications can communicate with a high level of performance. The aim in this respect is also to be able to develop the applications independently of each other in a modular manner.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,115,646 describes a process automation system based on a heterogeneous distributed software system and an ORB (Object Request Broker). CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is used as the ORB in this respect. The aim of this invention is to make workflow management services available.